Gartner Reports BYOD to Explode

According to a new study by Gartner, bring-your-own-device strategies are the single most radical change to the economics and culture of client computing in a decade. By 2017, half of all employers will require workers to supply their own devices for work purposes. Gartner also reports that companies in the UnitedStates are twice as likely to allow BYOD as those in Europe, where BYOD has the lowest adoption of all the regions. In contrast, employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device, typically a standard mobile phone, at work.

The study also claims that security is the top BYOD concern. The risk of data leaks on mobile platforms is particularly acute today. Some mobile devices are designed to share data in the cloud and have no general-purpose file system for applications to share, increasing the potential for data to be easily duplicated between applications and moved between applications and the cloud.

Google’s new decision to have Android apps on Google Play updated through the online store will likely improve security on the mobile platform, reported Antone Gonsalves on CSO. The new Google Play policy blocks “self updating apps,” a common type of malware that has been getting through Google Bouncer, a security service for Google Play. That loophole was closed Friday by the simple addition of one sentence to the Google Play Developer Program Policies. At the end of the section titled “Dangerous Products” is the following addition: “An app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play’s update mechanism.”

“The change does appear to be aimed at Facebook,” suggested The Register’s Neil McAllister, “which in March began testing a version of its Android app that can download security fixes and feature updates automatically in the background, via a ‘silent update’ feature.”

What do you think about this week’s news? Contact the Appthority team on Twitter at @GetAppthority.